On Saturday the 31st of January, 2009, Don, Marlene and I went snowshoeing from the Snowbasin Ski Resort over into the Maples picnic area. From there we started out on the Maples hiking trail up to the Ogden Overlook, but I think we ended up taking a shortcut by following someone else's tracks. When looking at the map later, we didn't follow the summer trail. My GPS showed it at a distance of about 2 miles while climbing 1,260 feet. That doesn't sound like much, but when climbing in deep snow with snowshoes, it was enough for us. It took us more than four hours to get up there, but we did stop often to rest and take photos, about 200 of them. Coming back down only took an hour and a half. It was well worth the effort for me and I was able to get some great photos.

Four days earlier I went up to check out the area of the Maples to see if it would make a good place for our snowshoe outing. I only went in as far as the Maples Trail head, but was very much impressed with the area. Good snow and beautiful area for our hike. Some of the photos used on these pages were taken on the 27th of January and show the trees covered with more snow.

Snowshoeing in the Maples

We parked in the lower parking lot, north and west from the main lodge at Snowbasin. The road over to The Maples is closed to cars in the winter, but had been groomed for cross country skiing. We walked along one side of that until we reached the trail head. From there the trail was fairly well packed by others up to the first ridge, where you could look back down at the Snowbasin area and north over into Ogden Canyon. I knew from looking at the map that there was a trail on up to a higher ridge where you could see down into Ogden. We wanted to get up there, but no one had snowshoed that part of the trail. We decided to try it anyway and could discern approximately where the trail ran, so we broke a new trail through the snow. Now the going was a bit harder. Along the way we stopped for lunch and a younger couple caught up with us and we let them take the lead. Later they yelled back down to us that they had reached the top. That was nice for us, because we were on the verge of tuning back. We went on up and found the view well worth the climb.

View of Coldwater Canyon, Ogden Canyon and Ogden City down 12th street

I recently found a program for stitching photos together into long panoramic views, so I took a lot of photos with that intention. I have included a page of them. Click here or on photo below to see them.

Panoramic view taken from the Ogden Overlook. Click on photo to see more panoramas

Related Photos

Snow Shoeing to Ogden Overlook

Ogden Overlook, 2012

Ogden Overlook, 2012

Ogden Overlook, 2011

Ogden Overlook, 2010

More Snow Shoeing

I used a Canon Powershot SD700 IS Digital Elph, 6 megapixel, with 4x optical and 4x digital zoom.

Original photos were taken at aprox 2800 x 2100. These photos are set to 750 x 560 for faster loading. You are welcome to look at or download any of the photos. If you use them on any other webpage, please give credit and refer back to me.